can save its victims from destruction.
I trust I have said nothing that can allure any one into the habit: my whole object has been, professedly and in reality, to do the contrary.
Referring him, if so inclined, to some fragmentary notes on different subjects connected with opium and opium eaters in the Appendix to this work, I now respectfully bid the reader farewell.
APPENDIX.
NOTE No. 1.—COLERIDGE AND THE CRITICS.
Coleridge was unfortunate in having lived in an age in which party spirit was bitter in the extreme, and literary criticism, either from this or other causes, was no less malignant and bitter. It seems that Coleridge claimed that the “Edinburgh Review” employed the venomous Hazlitt to “run him down,” in a criticism on the Lay Sermon—that Hazlitt had been employed by reason of his genius for satire, being a splenetic misanthropist, and for his known hostility to Coleridge. The “Edinburgh Review” denied that he was employed for this purpose. Whether he did the job of his own volition and spontaneous motion or not, he did it, and did it well; he noted him closely to “abuse him scientifically.” All this after Coleridge had received him at his house, and given him advice that proved greatly to his advantage. Hazlitt, in an essay on the poets, acknowledges and explicitly states that Coleridge roused him into a consciousness of his own powers—gave his mind its first impetus to unfolding. It is said that Coleridge encouraged him when every one did not perceive so much in the “rough diamond.”
Jeffrey, editor of the “Edinburgh Review,” in a critique on the Christabel, took occasion to thoroughly personally abuse and villify Wordsworth, Southey, and Coleridge. He accorded no merit whatever to the Christabel. This after he had been the recipient of Coleridge’s hospitality, and had acted in a friendly manner.
I copy the following from the memoir of Keats, introductory to a volume of his poetical works, edited by William B. Scott: